by Walter Lord
Near Bergues, a walled medieval town five miles south of Dunkirk, Bridgeman took a break for lunch. Climbing to the top of an artificial mound—the only rise in the area—he sat alone with his driver, munching his rations and contemplating the problem of defending this flat countryside. The south seemed the best tank country—fewer canals to cross—and he decided that the panzers would probably come that way. If so, Cassel was the main town that lay in their path. It was the place that must be held, while the BEF scrambled up the corridor to Dunkirk.
Bridgeman got back to Prémesques late that evening to learn he had a new job. He was now Operations Officer for Lieutenant-General Sir Ronald Adam, who had just been appointed to command the Dunkirk perimeter. So far both the perimeter and the troops holding it existed only on paper, but Bridgeman himself had drawn up the defense plans. Now he would have a chance to see how they worked. If practical, both Dunkirk and the area around it might be held long enough to get the BEF to the coast. After that, it would be the Navy’s job to get them home.
But did the Navy, or anyone in London, understand the size of the job? So far, Gort had little reason to feel that they did. The trumpet blasts from Churchill, the fruitless telephone talks with the War Office, Ironside’s visit on the 20th, even Dill’s visit on the 25th—none were very reassuring. Normally the most tactful of men, Dill actually left the impression that London felt the BEF wasn’t trying hard enough. Now Gort had a message that indicated to him that the Navy was assigning only four destroyers to the evacuation.
That afternoon—the 26th—he summoned RAF Group Captain Victor Goddard to the Command Post at Prémesques. Normally Goddard was Gort’s Air Adviser, but there were no longer any air operations to advise him on. In fact, there was only one RAF plane left in northern France. It was an Ensign transport that had brought in a special consignment of antitank shells. As it approached, it had been shot down by trigger-happy British gunners but fortunately crash-landed in a potato field just where the ammunition was needed.
Learning that the plane could be repaired, Gort asked Goddard to catch a ride in it to London that night and attend the meeting of the Chiefs of Staff the following morning as Gort’s personal representative. The Navy must be told that somehow a much bigger effort was needed. It would be improper for Goddard to speak directly to anybody at the Admiralty, and useless to speak to Ironside alone, but to speak to Ironside in the presence of the Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, might accomplish something.
“It must be done,” stressed Gort, “in the presence of Dudley Pound. He must be there. He certainly will be in the Chiefs-of-Staff daily meeting, and he must be confronted with the task. You can’t tell the Admiral what to do, but you can tell Ironside what I want him to get the Admiral to do!”
Goddard quickly packed his kit and at 11:30 p.m. arrived in a staff car at the potato field where the crippled plane had landed. With him were five other airmen—the last of the RAF staff attached to Gort’s headquarters. They too were no longer needed. A brief search in the dark, and the plane was found. The crew were still working on it, but the pilot said he should be ready in an hour. The field was long enough—400 yards—all he needed were lights to guide him down the “runway.” The RAF car’s headlights would do nicely.
At 1:00 a.m. they were off, roaring down the field, barely clearing the hedges, leaving behind the car, abandoned with motor running and lights still burning. It was a brand new Chevrolet, and Goddard mused about the wastefulness of war.
By 3:00 they were over the Channel … 4:30, and they touched down briefly at Mansion … 7:00, and they were at Hendon, outside London. A staff car whisked Goddard into town, and it was about 8:10 when he arrived at Whitehall.
Thanks to a combination of lucky meetings with old friends, some persuasive talk, and the aura that went with an officer “just back from the front,” shortly after 9:00 Goddard was escorted down to the basement, ushered through a heavily guarded door marked CHIEFS OF STAFF ONLY, and into a large, rectangular, windowless room.
There they all were, the war leaders of the British Empire, seated at a number of tables arranged to form a hollow square. Here and there papers lay scattered over the dark blue tablecloth. The only unexpected twist; Ironside wasn’t there. He had just been replaced as Chief of the Imperial General Staff by General Dill.
Admiral Pound was presiding, and he was discussing the limited number of destroyers that could be used at Dunkirk—the very point that had so upset Gort. Unfortunately Dill had already contributed whatever he had to say, and there was no chance to give him the message from Gort that Pound was meant to hear. For a relatively junior RAF officer to appeal directly to the Chief of Naval Staff was, as Goddard well knew, an unpardonable breach of protocol.
Pound finished, asking, “Any more on that?” Only silence as Goddard watched his opportunity slip away, his mission turn into dismal failure. “Well, then,” said Pound, “we’ll go on to the next item.”
Suddenly Goddard heard his own voice speaking, directly to the Admiral of the Fleet: “I have been sent by Lord Gort to say that the provision made is not nearly enough. …” Pound gave him a startled look; the room rustled; and all eyes swung to him. Across the table Sir Richard Peirse, the Vice-Chief of Air Staff, sat bolt upright, aghast.
It was too late to stop now. Goddard went on and on, detailing the requirements of the hour, going far beyond anything Gort had told him to say. “You must send not only Channel packets, but pleasure steamers, coasters, fishing boats, lifeboats, yachts, motorboats, everything that can cross the Channel!”
He was repeating himself now: “Everything that can cross the Channel must be sent … everything … even rowing boats!”
At this point Peirse got up from his seat, slipped over, and whispered, “You are a bit overwrought. You must get up and leave here, now.”
Goddard knew that all too well. He rose, made a slight bow in Pound’s direction, and managed to leave the room with a reasonable degree of composure. But he felt utterly ashamed of his outburst, coupled with dejection at his failure to win any kind of sympathy or response.
Perhaps he would not have felt so badly had he known that at this very moment other men were acting along the lines he had proposed. They were men of the sea—Britain’s element—but they were not Chiefs of Staff, or famous admirals, or even sailors on ships. They were working at desks all over southern England, and it was their unannounced, unpublicized intention to confound the gloomy predictions of the warriors and statesmen.
3
“Operation Dynamo”
WHEN W. STANLEY BERRY reported to the London offices of Admiral Sir Lionel Preston on the morning of May 17, he didn’t know quite what to expect. A 43-year-old government clerk, he had just been engaged as the Admiral’s assistant secretary, and this was his first day on the job.
Admiral Preston was Director of the Navy’s Small Vessels Pool, a tiny blob on the organization chart that supplied and maintained harbor craft at various naval bases. Useful, but hardly glamorous. It was not, in fact, prestigious enough to be located in the Admiralty building itself, but rather in space leased in the adjoining Glen Mills bank block. Berry had no reason to suppose that he faced anything more than mundane office work.
He was in for a surprise. Six sacks of mail were waiting to be opened and sorted. These were the first answers to a BBC broadcast May 14 calling on “all owners of self-propelled pleasure craft between 30 and 100 feet in length to send all particulars to the Admiralty within 14 days. …” The call had been prompted not by events in Flanders but by the magnetic mine threat. To counter this, the country’s boatyards were absorbed in turning out wooden minesweepers. Finding its normal sources dried up, the Small Vessels Pool was requisitioning private yachts and power boats to meet its own expanding needs.
Stanley Berry dived into the job of processing the mountain of replies to the BBC announcement. He and the Admiral’s Secretary, Paymaster Lieutenant-Commander Harry Garrett, so
rted them out by both type of vessel and home port. Garrett, a Newfoundlander, found himself getting a crash education in British geography.
This same day Winston Churchill for the first time began thinking of the possibility of evacuation. No one was more offensive-minded than Churchill—nobody prodded Gort harder—but every contingency had to be faced, and his visit to Paris on the 16th was a sobering experience. Now he asked Neville Chamberlain, former Prime Minister and currently Lord President of the Privy Council, to study “the problems which would arise if it were necessary to withdraw the BEF from France. …”
At a lower level, other men were taking more concrete measures. On May 19 General Riddell-Webster presided over a meeting at the War Office, taking up for the first time the possibility of evacuation. There was no feeling of urgency, and a representative from the Ministry of Shipping felt that there was plenty of time to round up any vessels that might be needed.
Calais, Boulogne, and Dunkirk would all be used, the meeting decided. The basic plan had three phases: starting on the 20th, “useless mouths” would be shipped home at a rate of 2,000 a day; next, beginning on the 22nd, some 15,000 base personnel would leave; finally, there was just possibly “the hazardous evacuation of very large forces,” but this was considered so unlikely that the conferees did not waste their time on it.
The Admiralty put Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay in charge of the operation. He was Vice-Admiral, Dover—the man on the spot—the logical man in the logical place. He had 36 vessels, mostly cross-Channel ferries, to work with.
Next day, the 20th, when Ramsay called a new meeting at Dover, events had changed everything. The panzers were pointing for the coast … the BEF was almost trapped … Gort himself was talking evacuation. “The hazardous evacuation of very large forces” no longer sat at the bottom of the agenda; now “the emergency evacuation across the Channel of very large forces” stood at the top.
The situation was still worse when the same group met on the 21st, this time in London again. Another plan was hammered out; more neat, precise figures. Ten thousand men would be lifted every 24 hours from each of the three ports—still Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk. The ships would work the ports in pairs, no more than two ships at a time in any of the three harbors. To do the job, Ramsay was now allotted 30 cross-Channel ferries, twelve steam drifters, and six coastal cargo ships—a bit better than yesterday.
By the following day, the 22nd, everything had changed again. Now the panzers were attacking Boulogne and Calais; only Dunkirk was left. There would be no more of these meticulous plans; no more general meetings of all concerned. Ramsay, an immensely practical man, realized that the battlefront was changing faster than meetings could be held. By now everybody knew what had to be done anyhow; the important thing was to be quick and flexible. Normal channels, standard operating procedures, and other forms of red tape were jettisoned. Improvisation became the order of the day; the telephone came into its own.
Ramsay himself was at his best in this kind of environment. He was a superb organizer and liked to run his own show. This quality had nearly cost him his career in 1935 when, as Chief of Staff to Admiral Sir Roger Backhouse, commanding the Home Fleet, he felt the Admiral had not given him enough responsibility. Always outspoken, he asked to be relieved and ended up on the Retired List. He stayed on the shelf for three years, enjoying horses and a tweedy country life with his wife Mag and their three children.
Then, with the sudden expansion of the Navy on the eve of World War II, he had been called back into service and put in charge at Dover. He knew the area well, had been skipper of a destroyer in the old Dover Patrol during the First War. At first the new job had not been too taxing—mainly antisubmarine sweeps, mine-laying, and trying to work out ways to counter the enemy’s new magnetic mines. The German breakthrough changed all that—Dover was only twenty miles from the French coast, practically in the front lines.
His staff was small but good. Ramsay did not suffer fools gladly—never was the cliché more applicable—and his officers were expected to show initiative. He was good at delegating responsibility, and they were good at accepting it. His Flag Lieutenant James Stopford, for instance, waged a monumental single-handed battle to get a direct telephone connection with Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk. It would cost £500 a year, the Admiralty complained, but Stopford persisted and finally got his way. Now, with the BEF pinned against the French coast, this phone line was a priceless asset.
As Vice-Admiral, Dover, Ramsay lived and worked at Dover Castle, but his office these days was not part of the magnificent ramparts and keep that towered over the port. Rather it was under the Castle, buried in the famous chalk cliffs just east of the town. During the Napoleonic wars French prisoners had cut a labyrinth of connecting casemates in the soft chalk as part of England’s coastal defense. Now they were being used to meet the threat of a new, twentieth-century invasion.
An inconspicuous entrance within the castle walls led down a long, steep ramp, which in turn joined a honeycomb of passages. Down one corridor leading toward the sea, a visitor came to a large gallery, then several offices separated by plywood, and finally to the Admiral’s own office, with a balcony cut right into the face of the cliff.
It was not the sort of office normally associated with a vice-admiral. The floor was concrete, partly covered by a thin strip of threadbare carpet. A couple of framed charts were all that decorated the whitewashed walls. A desk, a few chairs, a conference table, and a cot in one corner completed the furnishings. But the room did have one amenity. The balcony made it the only place in the whole complex that had any daylight, except for a small window in the women’s “head.” Here the WRENS, as the distaff members of the Royal Navy were nicknamed, could stand on the “thunder-box” and enjoy a view of the Channel every bit as good as the Admiral’s.
By far the biggest room was the large gallery that had to be passed going to and from Ramsay’s office. Its main piece of furniture was a huge table covered with a green cloth. Here Ramsay’s staff gathered to organize the evacuation. A hard-driving naval captain named Michael Denny was in charge, presiding over a compact collection of sixteen men and seven telephones. During World War I this cavelike room had housed an auxiliary lighting system for the castle, and it became generally known as the “Dynamo Room.” By the same process of association, on May 22 the Admiralty designated the evacuation now being planned as “Operation Dynamo.”
The basic need was ships and men. It was clear that the 30 to 40 vessels originally allocated by the Admiralty wouldn’t be nearly enough. A closer estimate would be everything that could float. By now Ramsay had practically a blank check to draw whatever he needed; so the staff in the Dynamo Room went to work on their phones—calls to the Ministry of Shipping to collect available vessels along the east and south coasts … calls to The Nore Command for more destroyers … calls to the Southern Railway for special trains … calls to the Admiralty for tugs … medical supplies … ammunition … rations … engine spare parts … grassline rope … diesel fuel … blank IT124 forms … and, above all, calls for men.
It was a knock on the door at 4:00 a.m., May 23, that awakened Lieutenant T. G. Crick in his quarters at Chatham Naval Depot. A messenger brought instructions that Crick was to be ready for “an appointment at short notice”—nothing more. At 6:30, word came to report at once to the Barracks. On arrival Crick found that he was one of 30 officers required to go to Southampton and man some Dutch barges lying there. Why? They were to “run ammunition and stores to the BEF.”
These barges, it turned out, were broad, self-propelled craft of 200 to 500 tons, normally used to carry cargo on the network of canals and waterways that laced Holland. After the German invasion some 50 of them had escaped with their crews across the Channel and were now lying at Poole and in the Thames estuary.
Captain John Fisher, the salty Director of Coastal and Short Sea Shipping at the Ministry of Shipping, knew about these schuitjes, as the Dutch called them, in the norma
l course of his work. It occurred to him that with their shallow draught they would be ideal for working the beaches off Dunkirk. Forty of them were immediately requisitioned for “Dynamo.” The striped flag of the Netherlands came down; the Royal Navy’s white ensign went up. The Dutch crews marched off; British tars took their place. And with the change in flag and crew came a change in name. The British couldn’t possibly master a tongue-twister like schuitje; from now on these barges were invariably called “skoots.”
At the Ministry of Shipping the search for the right kind of tonnage went on. The burden of the work fell on Captain Fisher’s shop and on W. G. Hynard’s Sea Transport Department, which controlled all overseas shipping used by the military. In lining up additional ferries and personnel vessels, the problem wasn’t so difficult. The Department knew all the passenger carriers, had used them in getting the BEF to France.
But there weren’t enough ferries in all the British Isles to do the job. What other vessels might be used? What ships had the right draught, the right capacity, the right speed? The Department alerted sea transport officers in every port from Harwich on the North Sea to Weymouth on the Channel: survey local shipping … list all suitable vessels up to 1,000 tons.
Back at the Department’s offices on Berkeley Square, staff members Basil Bellamy and H. C. Riggs worked around the clock, napping on a cot in the office, grabbing an occasional bite at “The Two Chairmen” pub around the corner. Life became an endless chain of telephone calls as they checked out the possibilities. Would the drifter Fair Breeze do? How about the trawler Dhoon? The coaster Hythe? The eel boat Johanna? The hopper dredge Lady Southborough?
At this moment acting Second Mate John Tarry of the Lady Southborough had no idea that his ship was under such careful scrutiny. She looked like a vessel that was good for absolutely nothing except what she was doing—dredging the channel in Portsmouth harbor. There was no reason to suppose she would ever go to sea. She wasn’t even painted wartime gray. Her rust-streaked funnel still sported the red and yellow stripes of the Tilbury Dredging Company.